Where is murph the surf

Murphy takes them to Crystal River to see the manatees, drives them to school and helps with homework. He takes his eldest grandchild to St. Petersburg for Saturday swim meets. Then he goes over to see Bill Mills. Mills is 73, a chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, curse-word-uttering millionaire who builds things, including prisons. They met through Wainwright more than a decade ago. They argue about religion. They argue about everything.

The cynical Mills sometimes lets Murphy say a quick grace before dinner. He has walked the walk for many years. But that was before they attended the sunrise service Murphy conducted on Easter Sunday. Afterward, he weaved palm-frond hats for all comers. At Sumter Correctional, another gate slams behind Murphy. He follows a guard down a corridor into a big hall. Half the seats are filled with two dozen prison officials and VIPs. About that many convicts, dressed in their prison blues, occupy the other chairs.

Murphy scopes out the room. Since he has visited more than 1, prisons as a staff member for the famous Bill Glass Champions for Life prison ministry and a dozen others. Murphy has brought a guest speaker, a retired Air Force general who tells prisoners he was a self-important, cocky flyboy before he was saved by Jesus. In his stream-of-consciousness way he explains how he went wrong.

He says he was a smart guy who blew it. But people, man, they opened doors for him, they believed in him the same way he believes in them, the prisoners of Sumter C. You made a mistake. But no matter who you are, man — inmate, guard, warden or visitor — you want to finish well. You can accomplish something that matters. You can help others.

You can change. Bad men can change into good men. You got to finish well! While he was an inmate, a movie came out about the Star of India caper called Murph the Surf.

Aside from how screenwriters changed the spelling of his nickname, he thought it was an okay effort. But it only told part of the story. Murphy has been working on a screenplay he says will tell the whole shebang.

It will feature sex and drugs and stealing. It will have violence and murder and prison hard times. But it will also be about the Redemption of Murf the Surf, about how a bad man changed into a good man and is trying to finish well.

Bob Haiman is a friend who once was executive editor of the Tampa Bay Times and later director of the Poynter Institute, which owns the Times. But as their friendship blossomed, he grew to believe in him. Next time he saw Murphy, he described the trip. Petersburg Times in , and headed south for Miami at 18 years old. It was in Florida, while teaching tennis lessons at upscale hotels, where Murphy first began to steal.

He also became one of the most prominent surfers of the time — even taking first place in a competition in Virginia Beach in that was a precursor to the East Coast Surfing Championships.

After robbing mansions along the Intracoastal Waterway, he would swim the jewels to a getaway car on the mainland.

He was sentenced to two years in prison. The Star of India was found in a locker at a Miami bus station. Murphy stole again upon his release from prison in , according to the Times, which eventually led to murder. During a heist in South Florida, Murphy bludgeoned and hacked two women to death and dumped their bodies in a creek, according to court records.

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? All they saw was flat waves. Catri said they spent 27 days in Brevard that summer and never saw another surfer.

But their surfing legacy was just getting started. The Starlite Hotel on Highway A1A in Cocoa Beach is where Murphy and Catri stayed in those early days, "making surfboards and taking care of beach rentals and concessions" in exchange for room and board, said Hughes, who has written a few articles on "Murph" for the museum. Catri's surfing legacy also was just getting started. Melbourne's George Robinson, who has been in the surfing industry 50 years with his George Robinson Surf Designs, truly understood what Murphy was about later in life.

He found the true purpose of being a Christian. Murphy penned a little book called "Jewels of the Journey: Murf Talks to Wiseguys," that he handed out to those who would listen.

And there were thousands. He realized how God had spared him. Editor's note: Jack Roland Murphy died on Sept. This story was originally published in April.

As Terry Rae Frank slipped under the brackish water, her brain begged her body to breathe. Part of her skull had been split open, her abdomen slit. A wire, lashed around her neck and tethered to a concrete block, tugged the year-old down to a silty creek bed. And still her nervous system commanded her lungs to heave in a spasmic search for oxygen. Agonal respiration, physicians call it. As in agony.

A few weeks later they hopped on a foot sport boat alongside the hardened men with whom they had plotted to turn that paper into profit. Seconds later, the bludgeoning began. Agonal breaths ensued. Fifty-two years later , a fit, smooth-skinned octogenarian shuffles through a small gray guard house, past a metal detector, then down a flight of stairs and past the outer wall of Hancock State Prison, a close-security facility in eastern Georgia that smartphones tend to struggle to locate.

A dozen volunteers follow him through electronically secured checkpoints, past row after row of razor-wire fencing that keeps prisoners, many carrying life sentences, disconnected from the world outside. Over the next eight sweltering hours in July the man will wield his considerable charisma and intellect to help these incarcerated people reestablish some measure of that connection.

They have matching white jumpsuits, orange Crocs and vacant eyes, which he stares into squarely as he shakes hands, summoning a sense of humanity, trying to conjure hope from hopelessness. He first volunteered at a prison shortly after he himself was freed from one, in , having spent two decades inside forlorn facilities like Hancock. He served that time because a jury convicted him and another man of compelling those final agonizing breaths out of Terry Rae Frank and sending her to the bottom of Whiskey Creek with a concrete anchor around her neck.

First-degree murder. That jewel heist remains one of the largest ever in the U. The murders, meanwhile, are routinely rendered a footnote, or disregarded altogether. In news accounts. In his own book. In the eyes of the legions of people who love him. The young man was convicted of murder.

The old man brings his conviction to prison, delivers light to the darkest places, perhaps in the name of paying off an endless debt. The justice system has forgiven Murphy. As far as he is concerned, his God has too.

Can you? Should you? Penrod, 80, says he once saw the elder Murphy slap his son across the face for the sin of washing dishes too slowly. An only child in a home that demanded excellence, Murphy became an adept violinist and tennis player by his teens, finding time in between to drag pound redwood surfboards down to the Pacific Ocean with his friends.

He also began to count telephone poles and houses and cars on his walks home from school, sharpening what would become an extraordinary ability to case a room. There he found work teaching swimming, scuba, tennis and dancing at cabana clubs and resorts. He put his athleticism to use as a lifeguard and in a traveling high-dive stunt troupe, where he did flips and twists off towering platforms.

He charmed an older woman poolside one day, met and married her daughter, Gloria Sostock, and had two boys, Shawn and Michael. Murphy, meanwhile, settled in Cocoa Beach, where he opened a custom surfboard shop and spent his free hours partying and sharpening the dexterity that would serve him well elsewhere.

When storms chased lesser surfers out of the water, Murphy rushed in to catch waves like the ones he had grown accustomed to out West. For these exploits, he earned his nickname.